Reply #57: Retain factories

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I wonder if those people who think we don't need factories have ever worked in one.

I have. This may surprise those of you who know that I'm a Ph.D., but yes, I have worked in factories, both as a summer job and in the days when I was one of the proverbial unemployed Ph.D's.

I also spent my grade school years in a Wisconsin town that was dominated by two manufacturing plants. The fathers of my classmates mostly worked at either of the two companies. Their mothers did not need to work to make ends meet, because the father's wages supported the family well enough to own a house and a car. These were not glamorous, intellectual jobs, but they provided a decent living for high school graduates, and even high school dropouts.

I found the same thing when I worked in factories myself. The workers had no desire to become white collar, because they basically preferred to do manual or physical labor rather than "sit at a desk pushing papers." They liked the fact that they could just put in their time and forget about it afterwards. Of course, they complained about the specifics of the job, but that doesn't mean that they wanted to become accountants.

The old manufacturing jobs were as boring as hell, but they paid better than working at a convenience store or toting bedpans in a nursing home. The loss of these jobs devastated countless communities across the United States and created a downward spiral that sent even more manufacturing overseas.

Take shoes, for example. Most shoes sold in the U.S. used to be made in the U.S. Most are now made in the Third World. Why? Well, if your job gives you a comfortable income, you can afford to buy U.S.-made clothes and shoes. But if you're reduced to living just slightly above minimum wage, you have to buy Chinese or Brazilian shoes at Payless Shoe Source or go barefoot. As more and more blue collar workers fell into poverty or near-poverty, they became unable to afford U.S.-made shoes, and Payless Shoe Source, staffed by minimum-wage clerks and carrying Third World shoes, flourished.

I believe that countries have the right to decide which economic system they want to follow, and that no world body has the right to impose a "one size fits all" policy on them. If they suffer from bad decisions, that's their problem.

I remind you that the greatest economic success stories, such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and in an earlier era, the U.S., got rich not by opening their borders to economic exploitation by outsiders but by protecting their own industries and using the financial and intellectual capital of outsiders in tightly controlled ways to further their own interests.